The plot of T4 revolves around a T2000, which most certainly will be a post-rehab head-shaved Britney Spears because really, what's more frightening than that, who is sent back to kill not John Connor, not Sarah Connor, not even the guy the first Terminator stole his clothes from (because without clothes he could have been beaten by anyone I guess) but Kyle Reese, and a T875.4, Arnold in a wheel chair, is sent back to protect him.
Yeah, no doubt! I think I've only known two other people that liked EH as well... it's certainly not perfect (Sam Neill's character got a little dopey after he went all Satan-like IMO), but it's got a real creepy feeling to me. I don't know, I've always been good at mentally putting myself into a story, maybe that's what does it... the idea of Hell is pretty creepy to say the least, I think few would argue that, so willingly going there for all eternity (especially after being told the reality is so much worse than the word!) just to save two members of your crew, damn, dunno if I would have done that.
Besides, single best explanation of wormhole theory I've ever seen... should be standard viewing in all theoretical physics courses:)
I do see your point, but I think it's a matter of interpretation of the original premise, and I don't interpret it the same as you. To me, the choices made in T3 were exactly what led to the fate predicted (which is how you can view the information gained about the future from Reese and the Terminator itself). The father character (who's name I forget and am too lazy to go to IMDB to look up) could have changed things if he had made some different decisions along the way.
Now, you could make the argument that by Dyson dieing and all the work (presumably) being destroyed, then the future should have irrevocably been changed... your getting into a debate about temporal mechanics at that point though, something I doubt very seriously any human being that has ever lived or is now living is equiped to really debate because there's just too much we don't know and understand about existance to make reasonable arguments. You may say it was a cheap way to allow for more movies, and I suppose there's something to that, but with the level of uncertainty about what changes in the present really affect the future, whether the future exists or not already, etc., I think we can forgive some Hollywood types taking some liberties:)
I think to me the bigger point that bugs me a bit is that all of a sudden we went from a private company developing Skynet to it being a government project... presumably the private company was doing work on contract for the government, but it was a bit of a jump IMO. But, I didn't say T3 was perfect:) I just said I enjoyed it, really liked the ending, thought it was a good third in the series, which seems to be the minority opinion.
I don't get it... I guess I was the only one that liked T3... not the best of the series, in fact, it'd be #3 on my list, but still... I loved the ending, which really had that "oh shit, we're screwed" feeling that I love in movies (the end of Colossus for example). I thought John Connor was infinitely more likable than in T2 (could be because the actor playing him was a lot more likable IMO than in T2)... sure, could have done without the female Terminator, but hell, why not? What better way to kill a bunch of defiant men than fool them with a hot babe? No question SHE'D be able to get a lot closer than the Arnold model would!
Then again, I'm one of only three people on the face of the planet that thought Event Horizon kicked all sorts of ass, so I know, I have no credibility to begin with... but come on, you can't tell me the transmission they received didn't freak you out, and come on, a guy willingly sacrificing himself to an eternity in Hell for the sake of like 2 of his remaining crew? Has there EVER been a bigger hero?!?
Nothing like stating an obvious fact that we've all known was true for a long time. I suppose its nice that someone over there finally admitted it, even though he's inevitably getting a slap on the wrist from his superiors I suspect.
Dugg down for being a brain-dead obvious thing.
Oops, sorry, wrong site.
P.S. - Slashdot... WORST... CAPCHA... EVER!! I can't read that crap worth a shit. It's supposed to make it difficult for scripts to post, not legit humans. Someone should tell our fearless leaders that one can be entirely too clever.
I for one welcome our new, possibly even non-human invisible overlords.
(come on now, you know they found this in one of the closets they never before opened in the crashed saucer from Roswell... right next to the purple sports jacket, busted vacumn cleaner and running shoes"
Every time I see this argument, and I've seen it often over the years, it is obvious that the person saying it didn't get B5. I mean no disrespect with this comment, but I believe it to be true.
I think what many people miss is that B5 is one big coming of age story. The scope and stage it is played out on is larger than many other such stories, but that's ultimately what it is.
Every human being, excepting those that grow up in broken homes and other atypical environments (although, sadly, they aren't as atypical as they used to be or should be) goes through a rebelious stage where they are fighting their parents for their own independance. They have to find their place in the world, figure out for themselves what their purpose is, what they're going to make of themselves. And at some point, the parents, who have been guiding them all their lives towards these answers, have to step aside and let their child go and either sink or swim for themselves. It's a painfully difficult process on both sides.
Now imagine that completely normal situation when the two parents have vastly different ideas about how their children should develop. Do you think that makes things easier? F**K no! It makes infinitely more difficult. That's the dilema B5 presented, and the coming of age of the younger races is the underlying story being told. It's the exact same story you yourself probably played out, just in a grander scale.
Sheridan forcing his "parents", so to speak, in the Vorlons and Shadows, was the tipping point. It was the point at which the younger races declared they are ready to stand on their own, for better or worse. This is akin to a 16 or 17-year old beginning to take on responsibility for their own life and actions. Now, the Shadows and Vorlons had to be forced a bit to see the inevitability of this, had to be forced to step aside and let the natural course of evolution occur, just as a teenagers' parents have to begin to step aside and let their child fend for themselves largely.
No, the way the Shadow war ended wasn't stupid, wasn't cheap, wasn't a disappointment... it was the ONLY WAY THE STORY COULD POSSIBLY HAVE ENDED without being stupid. Forget that fact that we all know the Shadow and Vorlons could have cleaned up against the entire alliance. That's obvious. So a military victory would have been dumb, no matter how clever. No, Sheridan's declaration was about as perfect as it could get... continuing the analogy between the alliance and a teenager, that's just the way a teen would say it too!
I remember when I first saw Into The Fire, the episode the war is resolved in, and I felt cheated too for a while. That's because I didn't get it. I think I really got it when I had my first kid. He's only 7 now, but I can definitely envision the future, definitely understand all the things my parents told me and continue to tell me. I see it now, and I see why the resolution of the war was spot on.
If you think otherwise, you don't get it, plan and simple. It's nothing to be ashamed of, I think you haev to have certain life experiences to TRULY get it (you can understand, but there's a difference... sort of like in White Men Can't Jump when Sidney says you can listen to Hendrix, but you can't HEAR Hendrix... or something to that effect).
I'm actually glad that GWT was just coming into focus after the book was nearly finished because I suspect you wouldn't have liked what I had to say about it:)
GWT, to me, is very cool technologically. I certainly appreciate the heck out of it as a coder. It's definitely a beat product.
But as someone who is involved in determining how things get done at work, I'd have a very hard time ever recommending it for anything but small projects that a single developer could do.
For years we've all (most of us anyway) been striving for that goal of having page designers, those that are good from an artistic standpoint, and the coders who take the pure markup and CSS and add the bits that make it work. GWT turns this approach in it's arse because now you need coders to do it all. Oh yeah, you can have the graphic artist sitting next to you during development, but that's not nearly the same thing. GWT reduces web development to pure coding, and I think that's the opposite of where we've been trying to go for years.
Now, I don't know how many organizations actually realize this separation... I suspect not as many as those pushing that idea would suggest... but that doesn't mean it isn't the goal to strive for (unless you really just plain disagree with the concept in the first place).
I've been doing Java coding for quite a few years now, and one of my least favorite things to do is GUI development. Java always, to me, made it more convutled than it should be. Bringing that to webapps doesn't strike me as a great idea. I realize some people feel quite the opposite on this point and really love GUI development in Java, but that's my opinion anyway.
It's just my opinion, but I view GWT as something that is great for those small projects where your only going to have a single developer anyway, but I don't view is as quite as suitable for larger projects where you want there to be a difference between the page designers and the coders.
Actually, this book avoided those libraries for one simple reason: they weren't out there (or at least well-known) when the book was being written... GWT in particular only came onto the scene right near the end of the writing process... echo may have been around before then, but it wasn't high on the search results lists, and hence the author skipped it (actually, like GWT, he only really became aware of echo near the end of writing the book)
I know this because I have an "in" with the guy, so to speak;)
Take a look at the AjaxParts Taglib (hit the javadocs link and you'll find it in the ajaxparts package). This is a completely codeless approach to AJAX. Configure all your AJAX events in an XML file, what you want to be sent to the server and what to do when the response comes back, drop some tags in your JSP, and your good to go. There is an introductory article here:
"...it is the programmers that can collaborate properly and follow a project plan as given to them from me"
I agree with this. I am in much the same boat as you by the way, so I know where your coming from here.
"The IDE assists in dealing with a project's assets properly..."
This I have to disagree with. I know what your saying, and in theory I would like to agree, but I've seen cases where I was asked to essentially save a project that had become such a mess specifically because the IDE was allowed to go off and deal with the assets, while the original programmers didn't have a handle on what was going on. They couldn't even be sure each production build was going to work because they did not know the steps the IDE was doing (there were a number of instances of builds simply failing for no apparent reason that wound up being IDE config problems... not the IDE's fault per se, but had the programmers not been relying on the tool without understanding what it was doing, these problem wouldn't have happened).
One other problem I've found with most IDEs... well, more specifically, Java IDEs, since most of my work is in Java these days... they all seem to be painfully slow. Some are better than others of course (IDEA is *almost* usable to me)... but I've seen developer efficiency decrease because builds take minutes, simple things like right-clicking takes 2-3 seconds, menus take forever to load, etc. We are talking quite reasonable developer workstations here, so it isn't a hardware issue. Yes, you gain some efficiency with code completion and refactoring and all that good stuff, but I've found it gets balanced out, or close to it at least, by all the little delays, and certainly by all the problems I've seen.
But again, I'm not trying to convince you or anyone else that IDEs are evil or anything like that. I'm just pointing out some of the negative I've seen. I know there are tons of positives too, and plenty of people feel they are far more efficient with this IDE or that IDE, and I'm cool with that. I know what works best for me, and I don't mind sharing that. If something else works better for you, no problem. I tell all my developers that they can use whatever tools they want, so long as it all boils down to an Ant script that can be run on a "virgin" PC (i.e., just the JDK installed). As long as that is always true, I have no problem with them using ten different IDEs (we probably have 3-4 at the moment). I also require that the "core" project source not have anything IDE-specific in it. So, yes, they check out the core project and *then* check out whatever IDE-specific files they have to from a separate module, but it's a minor price to pay for everyone being able to collaborate together at maximum efficiency, where that efficiency is determined individual by individual, not by some corporate edict. This, in my opinion (and experience more importantly) leads to the best results.
I cannot tell you how many people I deal with all the time that simply cannot function without an IDE. An IDE is a tool, not a crutch, and I see too many people using it a a crutch. Until you are 100% sure they know the underlying concepts, DO NOT let them use a tool that might save them a few seconds of actual thought. I can't stress is enough. I've seen the results of people that can't perform without the computer thinking for them.
The business world will eventually learn that hacks throwing together craplets costs them far more time and money then a few talented developers doing it right the first time. Or they will continue to throw money at the problem, expecting that just getting 30 warm bodies that know how to press the right buttons in the right IDE will be a good strategic plan. Chances are the truth won't be realized until they go out of business.
Also, I should point out that I hear so many stories on a nearly daily basis on how the IDE didn't do what it was supposed to and someone spent four hours figuring out why it was munging a classpath, or not generating the XML config files for framework X properly, or some such mess. They spend more time fighting the tool than they do getting work done. It's a joke! How exactly is that IDE making them more efficient?!?
I don't mind if people want to use an IDE. I personally don't, and I frankly work more efficiently than a great deal of people I know who swear by IDEs (I'm a bit of an extreme case though... after 20+ years of programming, my technique is pretty refined). But if your going to use an IDE, you damned well better know what's going on underneath. If you don't then you have no business developing in the first place.
Related to this is my lamentations about people not knowing low-level programming any more... hell, even I haven't written real code in Assembly in a few years, but I *did* for a while, and I understand all the basic concepts... just being able to "think like a computer", which you'll never learn using tools that hide the details from you, is a lost skill IMO, and is the reason so many crap developers are floating around these days. It's all about thought process, not about what real skills you have. Anyone can memorize this algorithm or that domain model, but the people that can derive them themselves (or something roughly equivalent anyway) are the ones that are worth something. If you aren't "in sync" with the computer, at both a low and high level, your not an especially good developer IMO. IDEs make it easier for those that don't understand to *appear* to be in sync, but they really aren't.
Eh, whatever. The "best" development environment is an age old debate. If you have the basic skills, its a moot point: use whatever your most comfortable with and can be most efficient with. For some it's Eclipse with all sorts of plugins, for some it's vi and a command prompt. If your learning though, and if your teaching, do yourself and your students a favor and don't allow them to become crap developers who can only push buttons to get the desired output like trained monkeys. Force them to think, force them to become as intimate as possible with the machine (which is already difficult in Java, but still), and only *after* you are sure they are, *then* introduce them to the tools that will theoretically make them more efficient.
It's just my opinion, but it happens to be right;)
Anyone remember the old tech support call where the user asks why her scanner isn't working, and it turns out she was trying to hold the document up to the screen?
I agree completely with the snobish behavior... I am *far* from a n00b in general, but I am just barely above n00b level when it comes to *nix. So I've run into my fair share of a**holes when I was just trying to get a solution to something.
But, there is an underlying problem that is the reason for the snobishness, and Star Trek illustrates it fantastically...
Watch ST:TNG for a while... notice how powerful the computers are? Notice how the crew interacts with them seemlessly? You barely even realize its a computer. It is just a tool, a perfect tool that does exactly what a tool is supposed to do: extend the capabilities of the user with less (or at worst, no extra) effort on the user's part.
Now, then you have Geordi and Data who have to ocassionally rewrite the antimatter injector subroutines and such. Can't live without 'em!
Most of the world wants to be the crew, not Goerdi and Data. This fundamental truth is what seems to escape so many Linux pundits. It is also the fact that the Geordis and Datas of the world are indispensible that gives rise to the bad attitudes.
Linux endows those that have the knowledge and ability a sense of self-worth, and there's nothing wrong with that, UNLESS that self-worth comes at the expense of diminishing others'. You never see Geordi or Data attacking Deanna for not knowing her way around the Enterprises' kernel, do you?
This is one place where Microsoft has it absolutely right (even if you don't like the execution): they understand that people do not want to know all the details of how a computer works, they just want to be able to be more productive, and they do not derive their self-esteem from being able to recompile a kernel or get CUPS configured.
When the Linux crowd finally comes to that realization and gets over themselves, there is no doubt in my mind that Linux can evolve to dominate. There is far too much talent floating around for that not to happen. But without the right mindset this can never happen, and that mindset is that (a) users are not inherently stupid, they just inherently, for the most part, don't care about the underlying details of a complex system, and (b) you are not better than the user simply because you know more about the technology. You are valuable to be sure, but not inherently better.
Let Star Trek be the guiding light! Evolve Linux to be completely unobtrusive to the average user. Evolve it so that only the engineering team need know the details (most of the time anyway... Captain Picard knew a thing or two about engineering too!). And most of all, come down from the high horse that many of you sit upon just because you have some knowledge that others do not. Computers are tools, and not everyone has to know how the tool works in exquisite detail to be effective using it... IF it's a well-designed tool!
As an enterprise developer who does all his work on the web these days (well, INTRANET technically if I'm being honest), I know what your saying and I don't disagree. The spec compliance issue is one area where FF *is* better than IE.
But that's not what this piece was about, so for the sake of this discussion it's irrelevant.
But, I can't resist the comment... I've had seemingly just as much trouble getting FF do display things the way I want, even when I'm spot-on spec-compliant. Is it better than IE? Yeah, probably. But not by such a wide margin that anyone should be bragging about it IMO. And, as another poster pointed out, it's FAR from perfect in its own right... it just gets less broken as time goes on. But then, so does IE frankly (again, in terms of spec compliance).
Let me reiterate my key point from the original post... I'm not saying IE is better than FF. I personally see them as pretty close, which is a testament to the work the FF team has done to catch up to a much older product. What I AM saying though is I am sick to death of all the FF ra-ra pieces because they usually are trying to convince you of something using dubious psuedo-facts. The piece this Slashdot post describes was used in exactly that way, and it annoys me. And for the record, I get just as annoyed when someone comes along bashing FF with stupid pro-IE psuedo-facts. It's just that that seems to happen far less.
Your right, I do. And I'm more than experienced enough to know it's not a smart idea.
That being said, I am *also* more than experienced enough for it to not be a major risk because I know what activities to avoid. As I indicated in my original post, I've had scant few malware infections ever (only one I can think of that was of any severity, and that was completely my fault), and I have not had a virus infection in well over 10 years.
So, I would NOT say running as admin being more dangerous is a myth, but I WOULD say, again, it comes down to the user being knowledgable enough to avoid those activities that are likely to make it as dangerous as it can be. Again, mitigating the risk, not eliminating it.
I'm really sick to death of all the "Firefox kicks everyones' ass" pieces all over the place. I really can't stand being in the mindset to defend MS, but yet...
This whole "study" was stupid in terms of proving one browser more secure from malware than the other (which wasn't their point apparently, which makes the/. post even more stupid). The conclusion is if you take two unpatched browsers, you'll get spyware a lot, and moreso for IE.
Ok, as others have said, that's not exactly like finding out the Sun orbits the Earth or anything.
It is much like saying "hey, you know, if you go into a burning building without firefighting gear, your gonna get burnt".
REALLY?!? WOAH! HEADLINE NEWS!
"If you have sex with a number of HIV-positive people you may well contract the virus".
SERIOUSLY?!?
"If you vote republican, you will slowly lose your personal rights".
THE HELL YOU SAY?!?
"If you vote democrat, you will pay a bunch more in taxes".
YEAH, I GET IT, IT'S OBVIOUS!
Let's see what happens with two FULLY-PATCHED browsers. Will FF still come out on top? Yes, I would imagine so. I'm not about to say IE isn't inherently more dangeruos than FF, because I think it is. But it's a question of degrees... are two completely up-to-date installs of FF and IE going to be *that* much different? I would seriously doubt it. I'd be willing to bet they are close enough that you could effectively ignore the difference (until your machine gets wiped out by the.00000001% of malware that got through I guess!)
It's interesting to me... I've been using IE all along... there are some things that annoy me about FF that keeps me from using it full-time. In all that time, I can count on one hand how many times I've been infected with anything. And, once I moved to Maxthon a year or so ago, I haven't been infected with anything even once. The difference between IE and FF is not THAT big, when you are fully-patched.
Talking about anything less is pointless... and yeah, I know the argument... "But grandma doesn't know she should be patching her browser and doesn't know how". Well, get grandma off the computer! We don't let kids drive cars because THEY DON'T KNOW HOW TO (neither do many adults of course, but I digress). Using a computer is no different than using any other tool: you can hurt yourself, and sometimes others, if you don't know how to use it. Can't you smash your hand with a hammer? Can't you cut a finger off with a can opener? Can't you badly burn yourself using your oven? There is a certain amount of risk to using any tool, and you accept that risk, but more importantly, you learn about the tool to some minimal degree that allows you to mitigate the risk as much as possible. People need to start doing the same with computers. Not everyone has to know how to hook a system call or spawn daemon threads in a VM or whatever else, but keeping a browser up to date, especially as relatively easy as it is today? Yeah, I'd say that's the MINIMUM level of knowledge one should have, and if you don't have it, git knit a sweater, you shouldn't be touching a computer.
Enough with all the "FF rules and IE sux0rs" crap... if you like one or the other, great, no problem, choice is good, use what you like. But enough with constantly telling me how unsafe I am using IE (or an IE derivative). My experience does not bear it out, and even if it did, the answer would still be what it's been all along: the USER is more at fault than the browser.
Hey, when something gets through FF by the way, do we start screaming that it is insecure and no good? Of course not! We first ask "well, what did the USER do to let the garbage in"? Because OF COURSE it could never be FF's fault. And you know what? 9 times out of ten, it isn't! Just like 9 times out of 10, it isn't IE's fault... ok, to be fair, 8.5 times out of 10 for IE... like I said, I don't doubt FF is a bit better.
A little shameless self-promotion, since no one else is shy about pushing what they think is good:)...
Another nice introductory article to AJAX, including a working example webapp of a using AJAX with a Struts-based application: http://www.omnytex.com/articles
The AjaxTags component of Java Web Parts, which allows you to add AJAX functions to a page in a purely declarative way using a extremely simple JSP taglib: http://javawebparts.sourceforge.net/ (click on the Javadocs link and look at the javawebparts.taglib.ajaxtags package)
(Note that this AjaxTags is *NOT* the same as the project named AjaxTags that you may have heard of... this is an unfortunate naming conflict... this AjaxTags actually existed first, and this one is a subcomponent of the larger Java Web Parts project... it also has a very different focus than the other AjaxTags)
Geez, pardon me, forgot for just a moment where I was posting. This is Slashdot, home of people who cannot or will not actually READ things.
What I said was "There is nothing worse than a programmer who can only use an IDE". Notice the word ONLY in there? No, sorry, that would mean you actually READ *and* COMPREHENDED.
There are developers in this world that cannot write a program unless they have an IDE filling in all the blanks. They simply do not know enough to do it on their own. THIS IS BAD!!! If you don't think so, you should find a new career, you don't belong in the IT field.
There is *nothing* wrong with a developer who knows their stuff and uses an IDE to make them more effective. That means the IDE is serving the purpose its supposed to: BEING A TOOL.
Do I give a compound miter saw to someone that doesn't know angles and couldn't do the same thing, albeit less efficiently, with a protractor and pencil? No! It's stupid! You have to understand what the tool is doing for you or you will ultimately be just about worthless.
As for *learning* with an IDE, which is a different topic, I believe it turns out programmers who don't know their stuff because it hides many of the details. Well, I guess to be precise, it hides the *why*. IBM's Java IDE from years ago who's name escapes me for example, had this neato little GUI editor... draw some shapes on the screen, draw some lines to denote interactions, click a button, and out came gobblygock Swing code. Some say that's more efficient because you can do it in five minutes and don't have to actually understand Swing. I saw that's a load of crap because what happens when it doesn't work quite like it's supposed to (not exactly unusual for an IBM product) and you have to go fix it by hand? Guess what? Many developers can't because all they learned was how to push some buttons in a fancy IDE. The situation is only made worse because the generated code was done pretty poorly to begin with, but even if it was perrfect the point would still stand.
IDEs are tools. They should *not* be a substitute for a good developer. A good developer should only be made *better* by an IDE.
And as for the stone age comment... grow up. If you don't understand that people work at their peak efficiency in various ways, you need to get out of this industry too. IDEs can very much get in the way sometimes, and some of us have determined that none of them (currently) make us better. And if I'm in the stone age, fine, I'll stay here because I make a damned good living in it and I know for sure that I know what I'm doing, I'm not hiding behind something that does half the thinking for me. I'll pit my skills against almost anyone, and if I don't come out on top it won't be because I'm using UltraEdit and their using Eclipse, it'll be because they are actually better and would beat me if we were using the exact same tools, which is as it should be. But, I'll tell you this: I'll clobber many people that bring their big, fancy IDEs to the party, no question in my mind about it.
ctrl-space is NOT learning the class libraries. It is using the crutch that Eclipse (or any IDE for that matter) is.
There is nothing worse than a programmer who can only use an IDE. I always recommend people use a straigh text editor to learn. Yes, it'll be tougher going, but what you get at the end is someone that actually UNDERSTANDS what they are doing. At *that* point it's OK to move to an IDE because then it becomes what it should be: a tool.
I personally do all my work in UltraEdit, and am *more* effective than many of the developers I know. That partially has to do with the fact that I type damned fast:) But moreso it's because I don't have to get out of the flow of what I'm doing to run through some wizard who's output code I'm going to have to massage anyway.
Oh yeah, and for the actual question of the thread: I'd lean towards Java, but I don't think it matters a whole lot, they are close enough that the basic concepts will get learned, as long as the IDE isn't doing all the heavy lifting for you!
I didn't say IFrames... I said "frames". Back then I'm not sure I even knew about IFrames:)
As others have mentioned, processing asynchronously doesn't have anything to do with user awareness of activity, it has to do with whether other operations are blocked until the another operation completes (meaning those two events are synchronous). In terms of AJAX, the asychronous part comes into play because relative to the "normal" flow of HTTP requests (i.e., clicking a link, hitting back, etc), an AJAX request happens independent of those types of things.
This points in this article, whether they were meant in jest or not (yes, I saw the comment at the bottom, but I'm not sure that comment ITSELF wasn't the joke) extend from one false assumption: that the web as it is today is good enough.
It isn't.
Another poster put it quite perfectly: the web has evolved into two "tracks", if you will: the data presentation track, and the web application track.
For the data presentation track, what we have is quite good enough, and quite well-suited to that purpose. Hyperlinking of simple documents was a powerful idea when first devised, and it continues to be so today.
But, when you start talk about hosting applications of even modest complexity on the web, it doesn't work as well. What we've been doing the past 10-15 years is really hackery. Successful hackery in many cases, but hackery none the less.
AJAX is a step in the rigth direction. Not the first step (AJAX can be done just as well without the XMLHttpRequest object, and was years ago, and we won't even mention Flash, applets and the other competitors), but a good step.
AJAX has its problems, accessability in my mind being chief among them. And I for one don't have the answer to that problem. But it shouldn't change the fact that if you are on that web application track, it might just be a sacrifice that has to be made. Or a solution needs to be found
Slashdot Mirror
So, to sum it up:
The plot of T4 revolves around a T2000, which most certainly will be a post-rehab head-shaved Britney Spears because really, what's more frightening than that, who is sent back to kill not John Connor, not Sarah Connor, not even the guy the first Terminator stole his clothes from (because without clothes he could have been beaten by anyone I guess) but Kyle Reese, and a T875.4, Arnold in a wheel chair, is sent back to protect him.
I am *SO* there opening weekend.
Yeah, no doubt! I think I've only known two other people that liked EH as well... it's certainly not perfect (Sam Neill's character got a little dopey after he went all Satan-like IMO), but it's got a real creepy feeling to me. I don't know, I've always been good at mentally putting myself into a story, maybe that's what does it... the idea of Hell is pretty creepy to say the least, I think few would argue that, so willingly going there for all eternity (especially after being told the reality is so much worse than the word!) just to save two members of your crew, damn, dunno if I would have done that.
:)
Besides, single best explanation of wormhole theory I've ever seen... should be standard viewing in all theoretical physics courses
I do see your point, but I think it's a matter of interpretation of the original premise, and I don't interpret it the same as you. To me, the choices made in T3 were exactly what led to the fate predicted (which is how you can view the information gained about the future from Reese and the Terminator itself). The father character (who's name I forget and am too lazy to go to IMDB to look up) could have changed things if he had made some different decisions along the way.
:)
:) I just said I enjoyed it, really liked the ending, thought it was a good third in the series, which seems to be the minority opinion.
Now, you could make the argument that by Dyson dieing and all the work (presumably) being destroyed, then the future should have irrevocably been changed... your getting into a debate about temporal mechanics at that point though, something I doubt very seriously any human being that has ever lived or is now living is equiped to really debate because there's just too much we don't know and understand about existance to make reasonable arguments. You may say it was a cheap way to allow for more movies, and I suppose there's something to that, but with the level of uncertainty about what changes in the present really affect the future, whether the future exists or not already, etc., I think we can forgive some Hollywood types taking some liberties
I think to me the bigger point that bugs me a bit is that all of a sudden we went from a private company developing Skynet to it being a government project... presumably the private company was doing work on contract for the government, but it was a bit of a jump IMO. But, I didn't say T3 was perfect
I don't get it... I guess I was the only one that liked T3... not the best of the series, in fact, it'd be #3 on my list, but still... I loved the ending, which really had that "oh shit, we're screwed" feeling that I love in movies (the end of Colossus for example). I thought John Connor was infinitely more likable than in T2 (could be because the actor playing him was a lot more likable IMO than in T2)... sure, could have done without the female Terminator, but hell, why not? What better way to kill a bunch of defiant men than fool them with a hot babe? No question SHE'D be able to get a lot closer than the Arnold model would!
Then again, I'm one of only three people on the face of the planet that thought Event Horizon kicked all sorts of ass, so I know, I have no credibility to begin with... but come on, you can't tell me the transmission they received didn't freak you out, and come on, a guy willingly sacrificing himself to an eternity in Hell for the sake of like 2 of his remaining crew? Has there EVER been a bigger hero?!?
I'm going back under my rock now.
Nothing like stating an obvious fact that we've all known was true for a long time. I suppose its nice that someone over there finally admitted it, even though he's inevitably getting a slap on the wrist from his superiors I suspect.
Dugg down for being a brain-dead obvious thing.
Oops, sorry, wrong site.
P.S. - Slashdot... WORST... CAPCHA... EVER!! I can't read that crap worth a shit. It's supposed to make it difficult for scripts to post, not legit humans. Someone should tell our fearless leaders that one can be entirely too clever.
I for one welcome our new, possibly even non-human invisible overlords.
(come on now, you know they found this in one of the closets they never before opened in the crashed saucer from Roswell... right next to the purple sports jacket, busted vacumn cleaner and running shoes"
...Do no evil.
...
Unless it's good for business.
Then do just a little bit of evil.
Until people get used to it.
Then do just a little MORE evil.
Wash, rinse, dry and repeat until we're Microsoft in slightly different clothes.
Think I'm exaggerating? We'll see in 15 years or so.
Every time I see this argument, and I've seen it often over the years, it is obvious that the person saying it didn't get B5. I mean no disrespect with this comment, but I believe it to be true.
I think what many people miss is that B5 is one big coming of age story. The scope and stage it is played out on is larger than many other such stories, but that's ultimately what it is.
Every human being, excepting those that grow up in broken homes and other atypical environments (although, sadly, they aren't as atypical as they used to be or should be) goes through a rebelious stage where they are fighting their parents for their own independance. They have to find their place in the world, figure out for themselves what their purpose is, what they're going to make of themselves. And at some point, the parents, who have been guiding them all their lives towards these answers, have to step aside and let their child go and either sink or swim for themselves. It's a painfully difficult process on both sides.
Now imagine that completely normal situation when the two parents have vastly different ideas about how their children should develop. Do you think that makes things easier? F**K no! It makes infinitely more difficult. That's the dilema B5 presented, and the coming of age of the younger races is the underlying story being told. It's the exact same story you yourself probably played out, just in a grander scale.
Sheridan forcing his "parents", so to speak, in the Vorlons and Shadows, was the tipping point. It was the point at which the younger races declared they are ready to stand on their own, for better or worse. This is akin to a 16 or 17-year old beginning to take on responsibility for their own life and actions. Now, the Shadows and Vorlons had to be forced a bit to see the inevitability of this, had to be forced to step aside and let the natural course of evolution occur, just as a teenagers' parents have to begin to step aside and let their child fend for themselves largely.
No, the way the Shadow war ended wasn't stupid, wasn't cheap, wasn't a disappointment... it was the ONLY WAY THE STORY COULD POSSIBLY HAVE ENDED without being stupid. Forget that fact that we all know the Shadow and Vorlons could have cleaned up against the entire alliance. That's obvious. So a military victory would have been dumb, no matter how clever. No, Sheridan's declaration was about as perfect as it could get... continuing the analogy between the alliance and a teenager, that's just the way a teen would say it too!
I remember when I first saw Into The Fire, the episode the war is resolved in, and I felt cheated too for a while. That's because I didn't get it. I think I really got it when I had my first kid. He's only 7 now, but I can definitely envision the future, definitely understand all the things my parents told me and continue to tell me. I see it now, and I see why the resolution of the war was spot on.
If you think otherwise, you don't get it, plan and simple. It's nothing to be ashamed of, I think you haev to have certain life experiences to TRULY get it (you can understand, but there's a difference... sort of like in White Men Can't Jump when Sidney says you can listen to Hendrix, but you can't HEAR Hendrix... or something to that effect).
I suppose its worth noting that this book has a game project in it... interestingly, you can get that particular chapter for free: http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.t ss?l=AjaxWarrior
By the way, Grand Strategy looks very nice indeed, I'll enjoy giving it a closer look as time allows.
I'm actually glad that GWT was just coming into focus after the book was nearly finished because I suspect you wouldn't have liked what I had to say about it :)
GWT, to me, is very cool technologically. I certainly appreciate the heck out of it as a coder. It's definitely a beat product.
But as someone who is involved in determining how things get done at work, I'd have a very hard time ever recommending it for anything but small projects that a single developer could do.
For years we've all (most of us anyway) been striving for that goal of having page designers, those that are good from an artistic standpoint, and the coders who take the pure markup and CSS and add the bits that make it work. GWT turns this approach in it's arse because now you need coders to do it all. Oh yeah, you can have the graphic artist sitting next to you during development, but that's not nearly the same thing. GWT reduces web development to pure coding, and I think that's the opposite of where we've been trying to go for years.
Now, I don't know how many organizations actually realize this separation... I suspect not as many as those pushing that idea would suggest... but that doesn't mean it isn't the goal to strive for (unless you really just plain disagree with the concept in the first place).
I've been doing Java coding for quite a few years now, and one of my least favorite things to do is GUI development. Java always, to me, made it more convutled than it should be. Bringing that to webapps doesn't strike me as a great idea. I realize some people feel quite the opposite on this point and really love GUI development in Java, but that's my opinion anyway.
It's just my opinion, but I view GWT as something that is great for those small projects where your only going to have a single developer anyway, but I don't view is as quite as suitable for larger projects where you want there to be a difference between the page designers and the coders.
Actually, this book avoided those libraries for one simple reason: they weren't out there (or at least well-known) when the book was being written... GWT in particular only came onto the scene right near the end of the writing process... echo may have been around before then, but it wasn't high on the search results lists, and hence the author skipped it (actually, like GWT, he only really became aware of echo near the end of writing the book)
;)
I know this because I have an "in" with the guy, so to speak
A man after my own heart! :)
DWR is awesome, I truly like it.
But, if you are really a Java web developer, I have what may be an even better suggestion:
http://javawebparts.sourceforge.net/
Take a look at the AjaxParts Taglib (hit the javadocs link and you'll find it in the ajaxparts package). This is a completely codeless approach to AJAX. Configure all your AJAX events in an XML file, what you want to be sent to the server and what to do when the response comes back, drop some tags in your JSP, and your good to go. There is an introductory article here:
http://www.omnytex.com/articles
I won't claim its the best (although I certainly have a bias!), but it's worth looking at if your working in Java technologies.
"...it is the programmers that can collaborate properly and follow a project plan as given to them from me"
I agree with this. I am in much the same boat as you by the way, so I know where your coming from here.
"The IDE assists in dealing with a project's assets properly..."
This I have to disagree with. I know what your saying, and in theory I would like to agree, but I've seen cases where I was asked to essentially save a project that had become such a mess specifically because the IDE was allowed to go off and deal with the assets, while the original programmers didn't have a handle on what was going on. They couldn't even be sure each production build was going to work because they did not know the steps the IDE was doing (there were a number of instances of builds simply failing for no apparent reason that wound up being IDE config problems... not the IDE's fault per se, but had the programmers not been relying on the tool without understanding what it was doing, these problem wouldn't have happened).
One other problem I've found with most IDEs... well, more specifically, Java IDEs, since most of my work is in Java these days... they all seem to be painfully slow. Some are better than others of course (IDEA is *almost* usable to me)... but I've seen developer efficiency decrease because builds take minutes, simple things like right-clicking takes 2-3 seconds, menus take forever to load, etc. We are talking quite reasonable developer workstations here, so it isn't a hardware issue. Yes, you gain some efficiency with code completion and refactoring and all that good stuff, but I've found it gets balanced out, or close to it at least, by all the little delays, and certainly by all the problems I've seen.
But again, I'm not trying to convince you or anyone else that IDEs are evil or anything like that. I'm just pointing out some of the negative I've seen. I know there are tons of positives too, and plenty of people feel they are far more efficient with this IDE or that IDE, and I'm cool with that. I know what works best for me, and I don't mind sharing that. If something else works better for you, no problem. I tell all my developers that they can use whatever tools they want, so long as it all boils down to an Ant script that can be run on a "virgin" PC (i.e., just the JDK installed). As long as that is always true, I have no problem with them using ten different IDEs (we probably have 3-4 at the moment). I also require that the "core" project source not have anything IDE-specific in it. So, yes, they check out the core project and *then* check out whatever IDE-specific files they have to from a separate module, but it's a minor price to pay for everyone being able to collaborate together at maximum efficiency, where that efficiency is determined individual by individual, not by some corporate edict. This, in my opinion (and experience more importantly) leads to the best results.
...TEACH THEM WITHOUT AN IDE!!!
;)
I cannot tell you how many people I deal with all the time that simply cannot function without an IDE. An IDE is a tool, not a crutch, and I see too many people using it a a crutch. Until you are 100% sure they know the underlying concepts, DO NOT let them use a tool that might save them a few seconds of actual thought. I can't stress is enough. I've seen the results of people that can't perform without the computer thinking for them.
The business world will eventually learn that hacks throwing together craplets costs them far more time and money then a few talented developers doing it right the first time. Or they will continue to throw money at the problem, expecting that just getting 30 warm bodies that know how to press the right buttons in the right IDE will be a good strategic plan. Chances are the truth won't be realized until they go out of business.
Also, I should point out that I hear so many stories on a nearly daily basis on how the IDE didn't do what it was supposed to and someone spent four hours figuring out why it was munging a classpath, or not generating the XML config files for framework X properly, or some such mess. They spend more time fighting the tool than they do getting work done. It's a joke! How exactly is that IDE making them more efficient?!?
I don't mind if people want to use an IDE. I personally don't, and I frankly work more efficiently than a great deal of people I know who swear by IDEs (I'm a bit of an extreme case though... after 20+ years of programming, my technique is pretty refined). But if your going to use an IDE, you damned well better know what's going on underneath. If you don't then you have no business developing in the first place.
Related to this is my lamentations about people not knowing low-level programming any more... hell, even I haven't written real code in Assembly in a few years, but I *did* for a while, and I understand all the basic concepts... just being able to "think like a computer", which you'll never learn using tools that hide the details from you, is a lost skill IMO, and is the reason so many crap developers are floating around these days. It's all about thought process, not about what real skills you have. Anyone can memorize this algorithm or that domain model, but the people that can derive them themselves (or something roughly equivalent anyway) are the ones that are worth something. If you aren't "in sync" with the computer, at both a low and high level, your not an especially good developer IMO. IDEs make it easier for those that don't understand to *appear* to be in sync, but they really aren't.
Eh, whatever. The "best" development environment is an age old debate. If you have the basic skills, its a moot point: use whatever your most comfortable with and can be most efficient with. For some it's Eclipse with all sorts of plugins, for some it's vi and a command prompt. If your learning though, and if your teaching, do yourself and your students a favor and don't allow them to become crap developers who can only push buttons to get the desired output like trained monkeys. Force them to think, force them to become as intimate as possible with the machine (which is already difficult in Java, but still), and only *after* you are sure they are, *then* introduce them to the tools that will theoretically make them more efficient.
It's just my opinion, but it happens to be right
Anyone remember the old tech support call where the user asks why her scanner isn't working, and it turns out she was trying to hold the document up to the screen?
It seems the idea wasn't so stupid after all!!!
I agree completely with the snobish behavior... I am *far* from a n00b in general, but I am just barely above n00b level when it comes to *nix. So I've run into my fair share of a**holes when I was just trying to get a solution to something.
But, there is an underlying problem that is the reason for the snobishness, and Star Trek illustrates it fantastically...
Watch ST:TNG for a while... notice how powerful the computers are? Notice how the crew interacts with them seemlessly? You barely even realize its a computer. It is just a tool, a perfect tool that does exactly what a tool is supposed to do: extend the capabilities of the user with less (or at worst, no extra) effort on the user's part.
Now, then you have Geordi and Data who have to ocassionally rewrite the antimatter injector subroutines and such. Can't live without 'em!
Most of the world wants to be the crew, not Goerdi and Data. This fundamental truth is what seems to escape so many Linux pundits. It is also the fact that the Geordis and Datas of the world are indispensible that gives rise to the bad attitudes.
Linux endows those that have the knowledge and ability a sense of self-worth, and there's nothing wrong with that, UNLESS that self-worth comes at the expense of diminishing others'. You never see Geordi or Data attacking Deanna for not knowing her way around the Enterprises' kernel, do you?
This is one place where Microsoft has it absolutely right (even if you don't like the execution): they understand that people do not want to know all the details of how a computer works, they just want to be able to be more productive, and they do not derive their self-esteem from being able to recompile a kernel or get CUPS configured.
When the Linux crowd finally comes to that realization and gets over themselves, there is no doubt in my mind that Linux can evolve to dominate. There is far too much talent floating around for that not to happen. But without the right mindset this can never happen, and that mindset is that (a) users are not inherently stupid, they just inherently, for the most part, don't care about the underlying details of a complex system, and (b) you are not better than the user simply because you know more about the technology. You are valuable to be sure, but not inherently better.
Let Star Trek be the guiding light! Evolve Linux to be completely unobtrusive to the average user. Evolve it so that only the engineering team need know the details (most of the time anyway... Captain Picard knew a thing or two about engineering too!). And most of all, come down from the high horse that many of you sit upon just because you have some knowledge that others do not. Computers are tools, and not everyone has to know how the tool works in exquisite detail to be effective using it... IF it's a well-designed tool!
As an enterprise developer who does all his work on the web these days (well, INTRANET technically if I'm being honest), I know what your saying and I don't disagree. The spec compliance issue is one area where FF *is* better than IE.
But that's not what this piece was about, so for the sake of this discussion it's irrelevant.
But, I can't resist the comment... I've had seemingly just as much trouble getting FF do display things the way I want, even when I'm spot-on spec-compliant. Is it better than IE? Yeah, probably. But not by such a wide margin that anyone should be bragging about it IMO. And, as another poster pointed out, it's FAR from perfect in its own right... it just gets less broken as time goes on. But then, so does IE frankly (again, in terms of spec compliance).
Let me reiterate my key point from the original post... I'm not saying IE is better than FF. I personally see them as pretty close, which is a testament to the work the FF team has done to catch up to a much older product. What I AM saying though is I am sick to death of all the FF ra-ra pieces because they usually are trying to convince you of something using dubious psuedo-facts. The piece this Slashdot post describes was used in exactly that way, and it annoys me. And for the record, I get just as annoyed when someone comes along bashing FF with stupid pro-IE psuedo-facts. It's just that that seems to happen far less.
Your right, I do. And I'm more than experienced enough to know it's not a smart idea.
That being said, I am *also* more than experienced enough for it to not be a major risk because I know what activities to avoid. As I indicated in my original post, I've had scant few malware infections ever (only one I can think of that was of any severity, and that was completely my fault), and I have not had a virus infection in well over 10 years.
So, I would NOT say running as admin being more dangerous is a myth, but I WOULD say, again, it comes down to the user being knowledgable enough to avoid those activities that are likely to make it as dangerous as it can be. Again, mitigating the risk, not eliminating it.
I'm really sick to death of all the "Firefox kicks everyones' ass" pieces all over the place. I really can't stand being in the mindset to defend MS, but yet...
/. post even more stupid). The conclusion is if you take two unpatched browsers, you'll get spyware a lot, and moreso for IE.
.00000001% of malware that got through I guess!)
This whole "study" was stupid in terms of proving one browser more secure from malware than the other (which wasn't their point apparently, which makes the
Ok, as others have said, that's not exactly like finding out the Sun orbits the Earth or anything.
It is much like saying "hey, you know, if you go into a burning building without firefighting gear, your gonna get burnt".
REALLY?!? WOAH! HEADLINE NEWS!
"If you have sex with a number of HIV-positive people you may well contract the virus".
SERIOUSLY?!?
"If you vote republican, you will slowly lose your personal rights".
THE HELL YOU SAY?!?
"If you vote democrat, you will pay a bunch more in taxes".
YEAH, I GET IT, IT'S OBVIOUS!
Let's see what happens with two FULLY-PATCHED browsers. Will FF still come out on top? Yes, I would imagine so. I'm not about to say IE isn't inherently more dangeruos than FF, because I think it is. But it's a question of degrees... are two completely up-to-date installs of FF and IE going to be *that* much different? I would seriously doubt it. I'd be willing to bet they are close enough that you could effectively ignore the difference (until your machine gets wiped out by the
It's interesting to me... I've been using IE all along... there are some things that annoy me about FF that keeps me from using it full-time. In all that time, I can count on one hand how many times I've been infected with anything. And, once I moved to Maxthon a year or so ago, I haven't been infected with anything even once. The difference between IE and FF is not THAT big, when you are fully-patched.
Talking about anything less is pointless... and yeah, I know the argument... "But grandma doesn't know she should be patching her browser and doesn't know how". Well, get grandma off the computer! We don't let kids drive cars because THEY DON'T KNOW HOW TO (neither do many adults of course, but I digress). Using a computer is no different than using any other tool: you can hurt yourself, and sometimes others, if you don't know how to use it. Can't you smash your hand with a hammer? Can't you cut a finger off with a can opener? Can't you badly burn yourself using your oven? There is a certain amount of risk to using any tool, and you accept that risk, but more importantly, you learn about the tool to some minimal degree that allows you to mitigate the risk as much as possible. People need to start doing the same with computers. Not everyone has to know how to hook a system call or spawn daemon threads in a VM or whatever else, but keeping a browser up to date, especially as relatively easy as it is today? Yeah, I'd say that's the MINIMUM level of knowledge one should have, and if you don't have it, git knit a sweater, you shouldn't be touching a computer.
Enough with all the "FF rules and IE sux0rs" crap... if you like one or the other, great, no problem, choice is good, use what you like. But enough with constantly telling me how unsafe I am using IE (or an IE derivative). My experience does not bear it out, and even if it did, the answer would still be what it's been all along: the USER is more at fault than the browser.
Hey, when something gets through FF by the way, do we start screaming that it is insecure and no good? Of course not! We first ask "well, what did the USER do to let the garbage in"? Because OF COURSE it could never be FF's fault. And you know what? 9 times out of ten, it isn't! Just like 9 times out of 10, it isn't IE's fault... ok, to be fair, 8.5 times out of 10 for IE... like I said, I don't doubt FF is a bit better.
Ok, I'm done, rant over.
A little shameless self-promotion, since no one else is shy about pushing what they think is good :) ...
Another nice introductory article to AJAX, including a working example webapp of a using AJAX with a Struts-based application:
http://www.omnytex.com/articles
A more "real-world" example of using AJAX: a Struts-based chat app:
http://struts.sourceforge.net/ajaxchat
The AjaxTags component of Java Web Parts, which allows you to add AJAX functions to a page in a purely declarative way using a extremely simple JSP taglib:
http://javawebparts.sourceforge.net/ (click on the Javadocs link and look at the javawebparts.taglib.ajaxtags package)
(Note that this AjaxTags is *NOT* the same as the project named AjaxTags that you may have heard of... this is an unfortunate naming conflict... this AjaxTags actually existed first, and this one is a subcomponent of the larger Java Web Parts project... it also has a very different focus than the other AjaxTags)
Geez, pardon me, forgot for just a moment where I was posting. This is Slashdot, home of people who cannot or will not actually READ things.
What I said was "There is nothing worse than a programmer who can only use an IDE". Notice the word ONLY in there? No, sorry, that would mean you actually READ *and* COMPREHENDED.
There are developers in this world that cannot write a program unless they have an IDE filling in all the blanks. They simply do not know enough to do it on their own. THIS IS BAD!!! If you don't think so, you should find a new career, you don't belong in the IT field.
There is *nothing* wrong with a developer who knows their stuff and uses an IDE to make them more effective. That means the IDE is serving the purpose its supposed to: BEING A TOOL.
Do I give a compound miter saw to someone that doesn't know angles and couldn't do the same thing, albeit less efficiently, with a protractor and pencil? No! It's stupid! You have to understand what the tool is doing for you or you will ultimately be just about worthless.
As for *learning* with an IDE, which is a different topic, I believe it turns out programmers who don't know their stuff because it hides many of the details. Well, I guess to be precise, it hides the *why*. IBM's Java IDE from years ago who's name escapes me for example, had this neato little GUI editor... draw some shapes on the screen, draw some lines to denote interactions, click a button, and out came gobblygock Swing code. Some say that's more efficient because you can do it in five minutes and don't have to actually understand Swing. I saw that's a load of crap because what happens when it doesn't work quite like it's supposed to (not exactly unusual for an IBM product) and you have to go fix it by hand? Guess what? Many developers can't because all they learned was how to push some buttons in a fancy IDE. The situation is only made worse because the generated code was done pretty poorly to begin with, but even if it was perrfect the point would still stand.
IDEs are tools. They should *not* be a substitute for a good developer. A good developer should only be made *better* by an IDE.
And as for the stone age comment... grow up. If you don't understand that people work at their peak efficiency in various ways, you need to get out of this industry too. IDEs can very much get in the way sometimes, and some of us have determined that none of them (currently) make us better. And if I'm in the stone age, fine, I'll stay here because I make a damned good living in it and I know for sure that I know what I'm doing, I'm not hiding behind something that does half the thinking for me. I'll pit my skills against almost anyone, and if I don't come out on top it won't be because I'm using UltraEdit and their using Eclipse, it'll be because they are actually better and would beat me if we were using the exact same tools, which is as it should be. But, I'll tell you this: I'll clobber many people that bring their big, fancy IDEs to the party, no question in my mind about it.
ctrl-space is NOT learning the class libraries. It is using the crutch that Eclipse (or any IDE for that matter) is.
:) But moreso it's because I don't have to get out of the flow of what I'm doing to run through some wizard who's output code I'm going to have to massage anyway.
There is nothing worse than a programmer who can only use an IDE. I always recommend people use a straigh text editor to learn. Yes, it'll be tougher going, but what you get at the end is someone that actually UNDERSTANDS what they are doing. At *that* point it's OK to move to an IDE because then it becomes what it should be: a tool.
I personally do all my work in UltraEdit, and am *more* effective than many of the developers I know. That partially has to do with the fact that I type damned fast
Oh yeah, and for the actual question of the thread: I'd lean towards Java, but I don't think it matters a whole lot, they are close enough that the basic concepts will get learned, as long as the IDE isn't doing all the heavy lifting for you!
I didn't say IFrames... I said "frames". Back then I'm not sure I even knew about IFrames :)
As others have mentioned, processing asynchronously doesn't have anything to do with user awareness of activity, it has to do with whether other operations are blocked until the another operation completes (meaning those two events are synchronous). In terms of AJAX, the asychronous part comes into play because relative to the "normal" flow of HTTP requests (i.e., clicking a link, hitting back, etc), an AJAX request happens independent of those types of things.
This points in this article, whether they were meant in jest or not (yes, I saw the comment at the bottom, but I'm not sure that comment ITSELF wasn't the joke) extend from one false assumption: that the web as it is today is good enough.
It isn't.
Another poster put it quite perfectly: the web has evolved into two "tracks", if you will: the data presentation track, and the web application track.
For the data presentation track, what we have is quite good enough, and quite well-suited to that purpose. Hyperlinking of simple documents was a powerful idea when first devised, and it continues to be so today.
But, when you start talk about hosting applications of even modest complexity on the web, it doesn't work as well. What we've been doing the past 10-15 years is really hackery. Successful hackery in many cases, but hackery none the less.
AJAX is a step in the rigth direction. Not the first step (AJAX can be done just as well without the XMLHttpRequest object, and was years ago, and we won't even mention Flash, applets and the other competitors), but a good step.
AJAX has its problems, accessability in my mind being chief among them. And I for one don't have the answer to that problem. But it shouldn't change the fact that if you are on that web application track, it might just be a sacrifice that has to be made. Or a solution needs to be found